The year 1919 ushered in a remarkable new era.

Allied leaders met in Paris for something akin to a world parliament

to hammer out the terms under which international affairs would now be conducted.

It was the first attempt to replace the ancient maxim of Vi-Victus with something more civilized, more modern, more suited to the 20th century.

And it crashed and burned in just 20 years.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

The 20th century. Episode 315.

Lessons Learned Part 4, The Great Crash.

H.G. Wells dubbed The Great War, the War that will end war.

That was the title of a collection of essays published shortly after the war began in 1914.

Originally intended as a sort of solemn pledge never to allow the genie of modern ultra-lethal warfare

out of the bottle ever again, the phrase is only used in our time with heavy irony.

Before we delve into the story of the war itself, I want to take this week's episode to ruminate on the failure of all those

idealistic ambitions that emerged after the Great War, and once again we will do this in the

form of a listical, just as we did back in episodes 36, 79, and 174.

The top 10 lessons to be learned from the failure of the Paris Peace Conference and the outbreak of a Second World War.

Number 10.

Militarism is harder to extinguish than you might think.

When H.G. Wells and the others who wrote about the end of war held out that vision,

the argument ran like this, that most of the advanced Western nations had already outgrown

militarist expansionist tendencies. The war only happened because of Germany's

unwillingness to let go of its atavistic attachment to its autocratic Kaiser and its Prussian military

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